Dell Inspiron Critical Errors..?

I don't have the laptop in front of me, but my girl's got an Inspiron with WinXP Home, and she's getting a critical error not even a week after she had a brand new hard drive put in (instructed by the all-knowing Dell customer service people). Does anyone else think that, perhaps, the Dell software that comes bundled is causing the problem? She's had the same problem on the previous hard drive, and it ran slow until the disk died. She's deep scanning with the latest AVG, Spybot, and Ad-Aware. Heck, she hasn't installed anything new other than the Windows Live Messenger and webcam drivers she had on it before anyway (and they didn't cause any problems before, either.)

 

It would help alot if you could post the error, more than likely a driver conflict. ed

 

That's the trouble, I can't really get that... she says it pops up on the taskbar (in the systray) as a question mark... not a pop-up box or anything.

 

I remember dell having a little pain ita program installed that reminds you of a lot of updates for this and that, could this be what she is seeing? ed

 

well, her comp's slowing down too